


Interactions

by atrata



Category: Iron Man - All Media Types
Genre: Extremis Tony Stark, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-19
Updated: 2014-10-19
Packaged: 2018-02-21 18:38:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2478446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atrata/pseuds/atrata
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hubble is dying, and Tony is drunk.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Interactions

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nicasio_silang](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nicasio_silang/gifts).



> for gabby, who asked me like eight years ago for tony, hubble & extremis. this is comics extremis rather than movie extremis.

* * *

Hubble is dying, and Tony is drunk.

"Pepper," he says, and his voice hangs in the ether until she can hear it. "Pepper, you need to call a press conference."

Under the noise is silence, and then: "Right now?"

"Oh," Tony says, because sometimes he forgets that other people still understand time to have meaning beyond space. "What time is it?"

"Three forty-seven in the morning," she says, and the data pours in, tells him where she is -- her coordinates, in context.

"Oh," he says again. "Why are you in Washington?"

More silence, and he tries to picture her, but his memory is fuzzy so he pulls up an image. It's pure rendered exhaustion, her hair standing on end and bags under her eyes, and he laughs before she can answer. But he has her calendar, her OnStar, the surveillance in the city, and she doesn't need to tell him anything.

"I'm hanging up now," she says, but she doesn't.

"Seriously, Pepper," he says. "Look at -- wait, are you..." he stops, fuzzy on the details of how this is works. "Fuck it," he says, making a decision. He sends her the data every way he can. "Look at this."

"Look at what?"

"I don't know! Anything. Look at the fucking microwave."

He's pretty sure he can't actually do anything with the microwave, until he realizes he can tell its display to tell her to turn on her television. He does, and she does, or at least he assumes she does -- he thinks he can hear her bare feet moving under the sound of a train derailing in Moscow and the opening of the London stock exchange.

"Okay," she says, and something changes, something opens, and he floods it with with pillars of hydrogen and the birth of a star, a ball of fire emerging from dust and chaos, a collapse into nothing and its black-on-black ripples, a spiderweb of--

"Tony." She cuts him off. "Did you call me at 4 in the morning to show me a picture of..." A delicate pause. "The penis nebula?"

He stops the flood of images and lets that one hang in the space between them. "Of course not," he says, his grin there and gone. "It's a galaxy."

"I really am hanging up now." And she does, and Tony closes his eyes, lost in noise so loud it's silence. He drifts for an eternity, and then funds whatever's left of the next servicing mission.

**Author's Note:**

> [this](http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2008/16/image/aa/) is the penis galaxy.


End file.
